The Socially Unwanted

I'd like to comment on a scene from the movie The Daybreakers. This is an action movie about a distopia where human kind is almost extinct and was replaced by vampires. As humans die, great companies take the lucrative business of farming brain-dead humans as a food source. However, the blood is beginning to become a luxury, the price is so high that the middle and low class start growing hungry. As they grow hungry, they become mindless creatures that attack their own kind.

The scene I am going to analyze takes place near the end of the movie as the government takes the decision, pushed by the media and the 'concern population', to exterminate these creatures, as they represent a danger for society.

The denotation level of meaning of this scene is a group of deformed beings, chained by the neck, are dragged, as they scream and fight, into a courtyard where the sun sets them on fire until nothing remains but the chains. This is witnessed by a group of soldiers and a few people with ragged clothes that cry as they watch.
I find this scene particularly interesting because during the whole movie we are made to understand that the whole society was meant to be a failure. Everyone knew that the humans were getting extinct and nothing was done about it. We get to this scene with a sense of helplessness because these are people they are burning, their families are watching and yet society approves of their removal. They are the direct result of a social system that doesn't work and yet society views them as 'other'.

This could be linked to Hyden White's concept of the 'savage', this being that serves as a counter example of the identity of a nation or a group. "I may not know who I am but I am certainly not that." Nations, religions and groups have used this to form an identity different from the others. The scene from the Daybreakers shows us how within a society this happens but with twist, because 'the other' here is nothing more than the least favored part of the society.

We could make a parallel between capitalism and this distopia. We often see in the news or even in conversation comments about homeless and poor people . We recognize them for the way they are dressed, the way they look (the same way in the Daybreakers, the hungry vampires are deformed, they are easily recognizable) and we see them as 'other'. They can be aggressive towards us and vice versa so we define ourselves as 'not them' but aren't we both the result of the same social structure? Do we not come from the same ideals?

The mistake

These two pictures I pulled out directly from Facebook. The first one depicts a group of school girls and the second one some of the same school girls twenty years later.

When the first photograph was taken the film of the previous photograph taken got stuck on the film of this picture resulting in the unintentional mixing of both. We see here one of the school girls that is sitting to the left of the picture also standing to the right.

The second picture was taken with a digital camera and the movement of the hand makes the picture seem blurred and even double.

These two images have one thing in common: the mistake. Sturken and Cartwright write that even the settings of cameras meant to take decisions out of the normal user's concern, have a certain 'ideology' for it is based on pre-conceived ideas that a picture must be clear and neat.

What I find interesting about these two pictures is the way they are broadcasted to the world in a place like Facebook, even though they are 'mistakes'. The user was unable to 'properly' use the camera the way it was preset to be used and yet they are shown like any other picture. It seems that our internet culture has completely erased the boundaries between what is wanted and what is unwanted in images.

Old age and femininity

Andres Serrano

Budapest (The Model) 1994

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

The meaning of this image changes a lot for me depending on where I see it. The first time was in Umberto Eco's History of ugliness in a chapter dedicated to the ugliness of women depicted in paintings from the Middle Ages to the baroque period. According to Eco, in this era women were seen as morally ugly, their obsession with outer beauty signifying a need to 'cover up' the ugliness inside. The picture of an ugly crone is interpreted as the image of moral degradation and sin. Now, when I first saw this picture just after reading this, my first thought was "what drove Umberto Eco to put this here?". Two pages after this he explains that during the Renaissance, old age in women and the 'ugliness' it gave was perceived in a more melancholic point of view. An old woman was seen as the embodiment of the decline of beauty and the loss it brought with it. This made me see that this photograph can give a great insight into what is unwanted, ugly or taboo now. Do we (or I) see this picture as it would have been seen in the middle ages? Do we see it as in the Renaissance?

According to Roland Barthes, each image has two levels of meaning: denotative and connotative meaning. The denotative meaning is, in a way, the surface, what we plainly see, while the connotative meaning is the cultural assignations we give to the image.

In this picture the denotative meaning is a relatively old woman, posing naked for the camera, leaning on a cane with one hand and smoking a cigarette. She has pearl earrings, a bracelet, a ring and a simple necklace. On the background we see a rather bare room, the corner of a window, a bed with someone naked lying on it and behind the woman we see the edge of some sort of wooden thing.

The connotative meaning of a photograph can be different for each person, or in this case it can depend on where it is seen. When I learned that this image was part of a collection of portraits by the same photographer with a similar style but different models, I thought that this image could be understood as a pro-feministic message. This is a lady, she wears pearl earrings, which remind us of Hollywood glamour as does the way she holds her cigarette. She is proud and stands before the camera with all the attitude of a model in a perfume commercial. I can see in this woman someone who is living her sexuality with pride even at her age. The edge of what I called 'the wooden thing' could be the edge of an easel so not only does she lend her body and personality to an artist (the photographer) but she herself could be an artist too. I see a lot of clichés of alternative, artistic life-style: the bare room, the easel, and the person on the bed. As we look at this picture we are also seeing thousands upon thousands of other images that have been engraved in our memory. We see Grace Kelly in a similar posture, holding the cigarette in the exact same way.

When I place myself in this interpretation, I could wish to be that woman when I grow old, to have that poise, that liberty but I cannot deny that this picture also makes me deeply uncomfortable.

The way this woman is leaning on her cane, the fact that we can't see the white in her eyes, that they seem hollow, that she is growing a bit of a beard and that she is very much trying to embody this Hollywood glamour, it all brings me back to the first time I saw it in Umberto Eco's book.

Is the connotation of this image that of a woman burdened by her 'sins'? Is this moral ugliness we see leaking out of her glamourous façade? Or do we see in this picture a veritable simbol of the decline of beauty? This glamorous woman needs to lean on a cane, her eyes are lost and looking somewhere outside the picture. Is she mourning somehow the loss of this Hollywood beauty?

In summary, I think is that, when we, the XXIst century viewers, see this picture we can see at the same time the medieval pictures of the ugly crone, the renaissance view of old age, the beauty of Grace Kelly, the feminist movement, our own mothers or grandmothers and a thousand other things. In a way, we still see the unwanted in this picture (feminine old age), we still see the ugly, but we don't internalize it the way would have in the middle ages. We can see beauty and melancholy too here.

This photograph of 'the model' shows very clearly this distortion of the concepts of unwanted, ugly and taboo. What in other times would have embodied these concepts, seem to be able to represent the exact opposite.